The Six Best Sci-Fi film cars

Manufacturers soon realised that sci-fi blockbusters were a perfect opportunity to showcase a concept too absurd for a motor show appearance – looking at you Minority Report Lexus and I, Robot Audi RSQ – but we prefer the real deals that sprang from the soaring imaginations of concept artists and set designers.

True, we still haven’t got our flying cars or hoverboards – and likely never will – but jetpacks might be a possibility and that doesn’t stop us dreaming of a day when we can say, ‘Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads’.

Lola T70 – THX 1138 (1971)

George Lucas has been derided in recent years for his retrospective use of CGI to alter his early movies but in his feature film debut, THX 1138, not only were the cars used for the chases real, they really were modified Lola T70 racing cars. This by the way is not their only starring role, T70 chassis were disguised as the Porsche 917 and Ferrari 512 crashed in Steve McQueen’s Le Mans.

By the time of filming the Lola’s were uncompetitive and relatively worthless on the secondhand market so made ideal stand-ins for the envisaged turbine-powered cars of the future. One of the Lolas had previously been raced by film star James Garner and after THX 1138 wrapped was given to stunt driver John Ward as part payment. The film even features a Lola T70 police car complete with lightbar and siren. Chases were filmed late at night in the unfinished tunnels of San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit subway system where the Lola’s wailing V8s attracted complaints from nearby residents. Sadly we don’t get to hear them on film as the cars were overdubbed with the turbine noise from a F86 Sabre jet.

Luke’s Landspeeder – Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)

Fast forward six years and George Lucas was creating special effects with a very different vehicle, the Bond Bug. The three-wheeler, cooler cousin to the Reliant Robin, was the basis for Luke Skywalker’s iconic Land Speeder. The hovering anti-gravity vehicle was imagined by special effects artist John Stears, also responsible for Jedi light sabres, the C-3PO and R2-D2 robots and the original James Bond DB5.

The XP-34 Landspeeder was built by Bond Bug creators Ogle Design (who created the Raleigh Chopper and Reliant Scimitar GTE fact fans) on the three-wheel chassis. During filming the wheels were disguised using clever camera shots or mirrors and a broom taped to the underside which gave the illusion that the Landspeeder was hovering while kicking up a plume of dust. 

V8 Interceptor – Mad Max (1979)

Set in a scorched landscape peopled by feckless travellers, renegade cops and savage biker gangs (I won’t make the obvious joke here but save it for the next entry) Mad Max was the first Australian movie to be shot in widescreen. Shot on a budget of just $400,000 it became a critical and cult hit, earning more than $100m worldwide, and one of the most profitable films of all time.

After the death of his partner, police officer Maxwell Rockatansky is offered ‘the last of the V8 Interceptors’ as a bribe to stay on the force. Although turning it down, Mad Max later uses the cars to hunt down the biker gang who murder his wife and daughter.

Based on a Ford Falcon XB GT coupé, the car was designed by art director Jon Dowding and built by Melbourne-based Graf-X who added spoilers, flared arches, a nose cone and eight individual exhaust pipes as well the iconic supercharger poking through the bonnet. After filming the car was put up for sale to pay the film’s creditors but when it failed to do so it was given to Murray Smith, the production’s head mechanic as part payment for his services. The unexpected success led to a sequel and director George Miller and producer Byron Kennedy bought the car back. After the sequel wrapped the car passed through a few hands, including a stint at the Cars of the Stars Museum in the Lake District before that closed down and its inventory was shipped to Florida.

Spinners – Blade Runner (1982)

Presenting perhaps a more likely vision of our future than the shiny optimism of Star Trek, Blade Runner is set in a grimy, polluted, overcrowded Los Angeles that’s full of fake people in the year 2019. Wait, are we sure this is science-fiction rather than a documentary? Well yes, the flying cars definitely set the scene as one taking place far into the future. Known as ‘Spinners’ these police vehicles can be driven along the ground like a normal car using internal combustion, are able to land and take off vertically thanks to an ‘anti-gravity’ engine and fly using jet propulsion.

In reality, these products of the fertile mind of concept artist Syd Mead famed for his world building in some of the greatest sci-fi movies, were built on VW Beetle chassis. They became iconic enough to have had cameo roles in the Star Wars prequels, the Fifth Element and Back to the Future II.

DeLorean Time Machine – Back to the Future (1985)

The first version of Back to the Future had hero Marty McFly thrown back to 1955 by a nuclear explosion and inside a fridge. Which sounds like a terrible idea that no one would waste film on… Fortunately director Robert Zemeckis and writer/producer Bob Gale decided upon the by-then defunct Delorean DMC-12 instead, which has probably done more to ensure the car’s enduring classic status than how good it actually was (it wasn’t).

Production designer Larry Paull and concept artist Ron Cobb created the time machine’s iconic look, including the flux capacitor ‘that makes time travel possible’. Building it was tasked to custom car builder Jay Ohrberg – also responsible for Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters and Knight Rider’s K.I.T.T. among many others – with just a few weeks before filming began. Ohrberg scoured LA’s many aircraft surplus parts stores and even junkyards – Mr Fusion is actually a Krups coffee maker – to create the car’s iconic look. Great Scott!

Taxi – The Fifth Element (1997)

The story has it that director Luc Besson was so impressed with the drawing of a taxi in the French comic book Valerian and Laureline – The circles of power that he changed the occupation of the hero of his forthcoming science fiction film from factory worker to taxi driver. Besson would later revisit this source material in the 2017 film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

The taxi cab is an art deco masterpiece of horseshoe grille, slit windows and bulbous wings; give it wheels and it wouldn’t look out of place on the Cartier Lawn. As driven by former soldier Korben Dallas, the cab also features a few choice extras such as threat detection, the ability to jam police scanners and four-point harnesses for high-speed (vertical) pursuits.